Today Kelli and I were out and about looking at apartments around town, and after the last one we stopped at a nearby park to sit in the shade and catch the breeze. We had to discuss all the stuff we’ve been discussing ad nauseum for the last few weeks. While we sat and talked, we spotted this group of seven suburban teenage skate rats around a picnic table under a tree up near the playground. These punks were digging up the grass and taking patches of it and moving it around to the playground as if they were gonna lay sod over it. Most of them were doing this, using some sharp items to tear into the turf, and just hand pulling it out. So we watched for a bit to be sure we were seeing what we thought we were seeing, and sure enough, wanton destruction was what we saw. So I whipped out my camera phone and snapped a pic of these guys. It was a little hard to see anything of use, and they didn’t seem to be tearing it up anymore. So we sat a few minutes. Finally, I called the police and dropped a tip. We watched these punks break some stuff over the barbecue fire pit, and waited. Finally, Kelli suggested we just go walk by these kids and look like we have somewhere else to be within the park. So we walk by, my phone is open and ready to shoot. As we walk by, I just obviously lift it and take a picture of the bunch of them collected around the table. We just kept walking, and as we passed and I folded up the camera after a good shot, one of them yelled out “hey, he’s taking our picture! Did you just take our picture???” To which I said, “yeah, right after I called the cops on you, don’t worry about it!” We just walked on to the other side of the park to investigate something for no reason but to give us the excuse to walk as close to these punks as we did. As we turned around, there was an officer who had arrived from the other side and had already gathered them together to chew them out! He told them that he could have them charged as felons, but let them off by having them put all the sod back in place. BUSTED! So now that there was a cop there, we walked back past these punks and still with camera open and ready to shoot, I took a pic of them as the cop stood by and made them put all that grass back. Then we got in the car and drove off. The cop had gotten back to his car as we turned the corner. We thanked him for coming out, and he said he had dealt with these “knuckleheads” before, and that if he wanted to, he could have nabbed them pretty hard, but let them go with what would be about a $400 piece of work to get the crew out there to fix. He noted that a park of this size would be a half million dollar piece of work to replace entirely. Yow. Then we drove off laughing our heads off.